Starting from , gradient descent repeatedly computes the gradient and updates
stopping when the gradient norm, step, or objective decrease is sufficiently small.
The Hessian bounds say that is -strongly convex and has -smooth gradient. With ,
Thus the iteration count is
convergence becomes slower linearly with the condition number .
For
the Hessian matrix is , so
Take
Then
whose Hessian is and whose condition number is .
The HHL algorithm requires coherent, efficient and repeatable preparation of the normalized state , normally through a known preparation circuit and its inverse; possession of a single unknown physical specimen does not supply that access. The component of on any discarded or unresolved small-eigenvalue subspace must also be negligible. Here is a unitary operator, so it is invertible and all its singular values equal one, giving condition number .
Standard HHL is stated for a Hermitian matrix with an efficient sparse-access or block encoding oracle. A non-Hermitian can be embedded in the Hermitian block matrix
part (a) supplies efficient access to . With inverse-polynomial target precision, phase bits, and an efficient preparation oracle for , the runtime is . The output is the normalized quantum state proportional to the solution , rather than a classical list of all its amplitudes.
For the p-energy
the first variation in the direction is
An integration by parts therefore gives the Euler-Lagrange equation
which is the p-Laplacian equation. In the notation of the question one takes .
For , the principal coefficient matrix is
Its eigenvalue in directions orthogonal to is , while its eigenvalue parallel to is . The coefficients are away from , and the condition number there is at most . On every region where , this gives uniform ellipticity with constants depending on , , and . At all principal eigenvalues vanish, so the operator is degenerate there and is not strictly elliptic on a domain containing a critical point.
For the HHL algorithm to have runtime polynomial in , the Hermitian matrix must be invertible, have a condition number bounded by , and be a sparse matrix with its nonzero entries efficiently accessible by an oracle. The normalized state must also be preparable in time. With precision costs suppressed, these assumptions let HHL prepare, with high probability,